AES E-Library

AES E-Library

Advanced Methods for Shaping Time-Frequency Areas for the Selective Mixing of Sounds

The Selective Mixing of Sounds (presented in AES paper 6552) contains a large and conceptually challenging part, which had not been developed previously. This is a method of determining the areas in the time-frequency plane. It has a major effect on the quality of the sound. In this paper we propose and compare a range of appropriate algorithms. We begin with a simple two-dimensional running mean combined with a rule selecting the track characterised by the maximum energy, followed by a low-pass filter based on the 2-dimensional Fourier transform. We also propose several novel methods based on Monte-Carlo approach, in which local probabilistic rules are iterated many times to produce a required level of smoothing.